Last week, Brooklyn's teacher pulled me aside after school to ask me a question. "Does Brooklyn believe in Santa?" is what she asked. It seems that she announced to the entire first grade classroom that Santa does not exist. Yeesh.
Andy and I decided, before our kids were born, that we would not have Santa as the focus of our Christmas celebrations. We are not scrooges, nor anti-Santa. I don't look down on every other family that celebrates Santa, it is their choice! Our kids still receive plenty of gifts(it's amazing what people ask) and have lots of Christmas fun. We are merely trying to steer the kids away from the materialism of the Christmas season and focus on the birth of Christ. By the reaction of a lot of people, you would think we've chosen to dye our kids' hair blue and worship our dog.(sorry, I'm a little frustrated)
We've lived happily in our little bubble until this year. We've given our kids the canned answer of "my Mommy and Daddy give us gifts and we celebrate Jesus' birth" to the questions of "are you excited to have Santa come to your house," etc. Brooklyn has really struggled this year because it seems her entire first grade class can think of nothing but Santa. She feels left out. She WANTS to believe and WANTS Santa to be real. We've had endless conversations on the topic. We told her who St. Nicholas was and how he is represented in Santa, etc. Finally, Andy got frustrated with the situation and laid it out in this way. Brooklyn, we don't want to lie to you. We don't want to spend all our energy trying to make you believe in something that is not real. If we convince you Santa is real, then you find out he's not, what are you going to think when we tell you Jesus is real? That seemed to shut her up...until the next day. As they sit at the table, Brooklyn turns to my mother-in-law and says "Oma, why did you lie to Daddy?" Moments like that you just want to crawl under the table and melt into the floor!
Andy and I still feel we made the right choice for our family, but had no idea it would be this hard!
For the moment, Brooklyn seems to be silent on the subject. But, beware of the spoiler!
1 comment:
I feel for you. This is the way I was raised and it was difficult at times. I have no regrets to the way I was raised. Ethan is starting to question Santa and I do not want to lie to him so I told him about St. Nick and asked him not to ruin the magic for other small children. He seemed to do ok with this. So far, Tyler has not questioned. Now what to do about that tooth fairy...
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